February 02, 2019

In the past, however, it's been my fault. Stress fractures from running longer and harder than a nonathlete with flat feet should. This time, a very tall, very large horse accidentally stepped on my foot and broke a toe. The doc with the X-ray warned me if I didn't wear the boot, I'd end up with arthritis and also not be able to run without pain. He also told me that if I were eighteen, I'd probably heal within a week.

Thanks, motherfucker.

So this week, I wore this giant sofa on my foot to my corporate job with a normal black leather boot on the other foot. I clomped around the office for four days before giving myself a giant overcompensation injury, supination. In other words, I woke up on Friday morning barely able to put any weight on my left foot. I broke a toe on my right foot.

So, yeah.

I iced my left foot and realized my Mac was down to 60% and I'd left the power cord at work. I headed in with a sneaker on my left foot and a sofa on my right foot and kissed any hope of looking cool at work goodbye for at least six months. There's something about looking physically weak at work that is especially threatening to me. Clomping is not my jam.

So now it's been a week. The doctor initially told me I'd be in a boot for three weeks. I think I'm going to get an X-ray next Saturday, just to see. Maybe I'm closer to eighteen than he thinks.

So many people have been curious this week as to what I could've possibly done to end up in a boot. That's kind of crazy to me after two stress fractures, a broken ankle, a plate, five pins and now a broken toe: How do you people get through life WITHOUT ending up in a boot from time to time? I'm now starting to wonder if my lifestyle is unusual or I am just unrealistically clumsy.

I suppose, though, the alternative is not moving at all. Staying 100% safe from boots and crutches but instead falling prey to high blood pressure or diabetes. I think as we grow older, the side effect of an active life is a little time spent here and there in a medical boot. I might be deluding myself, but I'd rather be riding horses and once in three years break a toe when the gentle giant accidentally steps on me than to miss the reassurance of the smell of a horse's neck while going through radiation treatment.

When I'm running or riding a horse, I don't feel middle-aged. I feel like I'm LIVING.

So, here I am. In the boot again. Thankfully, I have two of them and a set of crutches in my house. Just in case. 'Cuz I'm living.

January 22, 2019

Tonight the little angel introduced me to Ari's Seven Rings. Cultural appropriation aside, I need to react on a whole 'nother level. That's not really setting cultural appropriation aside ... I just have another subject to also introduce, and others have handled the appropriation better than I would.

Dude. What is wrong with us? When are we going to realize that buying stuff doesn't solve anything?

Sorry, Ari. I just can't listen to this and take it at face value -- you've never been one to brag on your dollars before, and I just don't want to hear it now.

Wearing a ring, but ain't goin' to be no "Mrs."

Bought matching rings for six of my bitches.

I'd rather spoil my friends with all of my riches,

think retail therapy is my new addiction.

I'm picturing Ari and her girl gang with their new matching diamond rings, probably enormous diamond rings, and realizing once again that even though I personally look around at other people's diamonds and think they are awesome, diamonds are actully not fungible. We only care about them because a long time ago, a diamond miner decided we should celebrate marriage that way. Diamonds aren't rare. Think about it. Diamonds are like assholes, and everybody's got one.

I'm not proud of the fact I look at other women's diamonds knowing that those diamonds have absolutely zero zilch zippo to do with the men's or women's who presented the diamonds love for their partner. Your love is not actually reflected in carats, regardless of what the industry would like us to think.

I'm going to be forty-five in a few weeks, and I keep waiting for maturity. Why do I care about diamonds and square footage and thread count? Why do I think having nice things is a sign I've moved on from post-collegiate threadbareness? Why am I obsessed with replacing all my windows? Where does proper adult maintenance separate itself from superficial materialism? STOP THE MADNESS.

So when I hear Ariana Grande singing about retail therapy being an addiction, instead of being cool, it just feels far too real. When the world is hard and cold and scary and the government shuts down for a month and plays chess with people's paychecks and livelihoods, it's really damn tempting to bury your head in useless diamonds and real estate and anything that can insulate you from the suffering you see every time you turn on the TV.

It's so tempting to think money could solve everything.

That diamonds held their value.

That anything material could insulate us from pain or loss or fear.

I'm not surprised not long after going through a ridiculously public break-up, Ariana Grande might be tempted to buy all her bitches engagement rings. It probably felt safe.

But if a diamond isn't actually worth money, then what does it signify? And why would we try to transfer that onto something like friendship that actually is worth more than gold?

December 25, 2018

Over the past year or so, I've been having what I'll call a stress dream over finding an apartment because I suddenly realize I have to go back to college.

I graduated from the University of Iowa over twenty years ago. In all the time I lived there, through two dorm rooms, one sorority house and three apartments with approximately fifteen roommates, I don't recall losing any sleep over where I was going to live.

I didn't go to graduate school in Iowa City. I went to graduate school in Kansas City, as an adult living with my now husband.

I have no idea why I've constructed this storyline in my head.

I realized last night that I have a created a whole town in dreamland that doesn't exist in reality, and I've revisited it several times now.

There's the two-story duplex with the leaky sunporch and hilly back garden planted with flowers I don't know how to grow. Its windows and doors don't lock, and I'm constantly closing the shades. It has a pool I have no idea how to chlorinate. It's on a street that doesn't exist and that I've researched several times over the past year in my dreams, trying to find my way back to my bedroom there, the one with the four-poster bed I've never owned.

The union where I buy groceries in my dreams is located just south of a four-story library I never saw in real life but where I study constantly in my dreams, sure I'm about to fail. There is a cupola at the top that plays calliope music at all times.

Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens.

In this town, I keep driving past a row of restaurants in Omaha that doesn't exist. I really like the Mexican one on the end with an ice cream parlor adjacent.

Brown paper packages tied up with ribbons.

We try to get a table more than once at the Mexican restaurant and are turned away because our group is too big. I don't recognize the people in my group, but they are very important to me.

The row of restaurants turns into a train line into the north loop of Chicago. I am very worried about missing my transfer to the library on the north end that I've never been to. Someone important lives two blocks south. There are no Ubers, only cabs. I can never catch one. I get back on the train to Naperville.

Snow geese that fly with the moon on their wings.

At the end of the line, a hyperloop takes me back to my sorority house in Iowa City. It has burned down, its ashes still smoking.

I flee, park my car in a six-story parking garage by Currier Hall, where I have a room on retainer up three flights of stairs. My parking space is eternal.

My cat lives there. I will always forget to feed it. It will cry out every time I open the door, and I will be terrified I have starved it, because I am so stupid I forgot to feed it.

I don't know which cat. There have been five in my adult life.

These are a few of my favorite things.

I've been back to this place enough times over the past few years that I recognize the stairwell in the dorm, the elevator that spins when I try to take it to a floor that no longer exists. It makes me nauseaus to get on the elevator, but I still do it, and it never goes where I think it will go. It spits me out on a different floor every time. The doors are adorned with handwritten welcome signs for kids I never met, never will meet.

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes.

The garden in the duplex dies and revives as different people move in behind it and sink swimming pools with no water in the backyard. Nobody ever buys the vacant lot next door.

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes.

Sometimes the duplex bedrooms grow huge and comprise city blocks filled with young people I've never met but who know my name. They never get out of bed but call to me to come join them.

Silver white winters that melt into springs.

I don't understand this dream, or why it keeps coming to me over and over throughout the years, much like the mansion with the ghosts in the ceiling tiles and the ballroom floors that haunted me ten years ago. The one with the roof that kept burning and falling, over and over, the one with the basement that filled with water every few minutes, then drained to reveal rotting floorboards.